The Terms as Words. Perusal of the wealth of dated
entries under “holy” and “sacred” in the Oxford
English Dictionary will demonstrate that in the lan-
guage the Anglo-Saxon term “holy” is older than the
Latin “sacred,” and at one time covered all that was
divinely hallowed or was associated with such by men.
Following the appearance of the word “sacred,” a
partial separation of functions between the two took
place. This separation, it may be argued, amounts to
a difference in the degree to which the user of these
words is willing to imply participation in the religious
tradition under discussion.
To refer to something as holy implies, in the over-
whelming majority of the cases cited, a commitment
to the proposition that the thing in question is in fact
holy, that it has been hallowed by God. To call some-
thing sacred, on the other hand, may or may not imply
a commitment to its sacredness on the part of the
speaker, for the term is descriptive of the veneration
accorded by men; in fact, though the verbal force of
the word is no longer felt, it has in the past meant
“consecrated.” The general contrast between the
semantic fields of the two words is obvious if one pairs
the
Holy Bible with the
Sacred Books of the East; in
the first case, one's own tradition affirms the writings'
holiness, while in the latter the title is descriptive of
others' reverence for them. Thus music, man's creation,
may be sacred but is not called holy; man's affections,
such as one's honor or the memory of one's beloved,
are spoken of as sacred; and a “sacred cow” is some-
thing in others' veneration of which the speaker mani-
festly does not share.
To test this general evaluation one looks about for
instances which do not fit. The Christian speaks of the
saint, the man whose conduct or experience he under-
stands to conform to holiness, and yet whose counter-
part in another community he will call a “holy man”
rather than a “sacred man.” Such an example, however,
alerts one to the fact that in English “holy” covers
a range of morality or discipline which “sacred” does
not: to distinguish holiness and goodness would be a
complex ethical point, but to distinguish sacredness and
goodness seems less so.
The semantic contrast between holy and sacred may
be discerned to a certain extent in European languages
derived from Latin, where medieval usage held
sanctum in higher esteem than sacrum (though the two
have a common etymological origin, and a rich and
subtle set of contexts in pre-Christian classical usage):
French saint/sacré, Italian santo/sacro, etc. The dis-
tinction is, however, largely absent from German: as
verbs, heiligen/weihen correspond to “sanctify”/
“consecrate,” but “sacred” and “holy” fall together
as heilig. The implications of this are fascinating. In
the Middle Ages, the domain of authority claimed
in Latin by the sacrum imperium Romanum became
semantically extended when rendered through German
as the Holy Roman Empire. And in twentieth-century
study of religion, our topic was shaped by Rudolf Otto,
who wrote in German and for whom therefore heilig
was, as we shall see, usefully ambiguous.
